By: Nick Gambino
Spider-Man first appeared in Marvel comics over 62 years ago and since then, the friendly neighborhood web crawler has gotten the comic, cartoon and even live-action movie treatment.
In almost every iteration, dating all the way back to the beginning, Peter Parker uses a specially designed web fluid that he shoots out of wrist devices he created himself. Ok, in the three Sam Raimi movies where Tobey Maguire starred as the titular character, the webs were biological and shot from his wrists. But other than that, cannon says that he made the web fluid himself.
Web-like fluid that allows a human to swing between buildings is a far-fetched idea that was more a product of imagination than science. That is, until now.
Researchers at Tufts University have created a web fluid that shoots out in liquid form but as soon as it hits the air, it turns into a sticky substance that can lift up to 80 times its weight.
This web-slinging technology is made possible by using silk moth cocoons. The researching team took this silk and boiled it in a solution in order to isolate and then extract the silk fibroin that’s one of its main building blocks.
In their research, they found that combining silk fibroin from the moth cocoon with dopamine triggers an instant adhesive effect. The dopamine extracts water, allowing it to transform into a strong, sticky substance.
Now it’s just a matter of shooting it out à la Spider-Man. They discovered that due to its unique properties, you can shoot the material out of a needle. As it releases from the needle point, it’s sprayed with an acetone which helps it solidify in the air. And that’s it. The Spider-Man web will stick to just about anything and has the tensile strength to pull or lift.
“If you look at nature, you will find that spiders cannot shoot their web,” an assistant professor on the Tufts University research team, Marco Lo Presti, said. “We are demonstrating a way to shoot a fiber from a device, then adhere to and pick up an object from a distance. Rather than presenting this work as bio-inspired material, it’s really a superhero-inspired material.”
It’s amazing to see artists out here inspiring scientists to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
